Wiki maniacs wanted
Jimmy Wales, saluting the crowd at Wikimania 2012Jimmy Wales (right) believes profoundly in the Wikimedia Foundation's mission:
Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing.
If that mission sounds a bit grand, that's because it is. The amazing thing about this crusade, possibly the most altruistic and ambitious goal ever undertaken, is that you can help. The grand mission, should you choose to accept it, belongs to you—and to every other highly privileged, highly educated person you know.
Wikipedia needs you
One of the most surprising things I heard last week at Wikimania was that the number of active editors is falling, down 4000 since 2011 at 85 000. You can help fix it:
- Create an account to watch pages, change the look and behaviour of Wikipedia, and edit articles without revealing your IP address.
- Next time you see something wrong or incomplete, edit it! Just click Edit.
- Help improve articles on your home town, your hobbies, and your profession.
- Pick a subject you care about (Well logging?) and look for red links, which are articles in need of creation.
- Join a project like WikiProject:Geology to collaborate with other editors.
- The Wikimedia Foundation runs on donations. Donate!
- If you want somewhere to practise, use your Wikipedia Sandbox (requires an account), or poke around on SEGwiki or SubSurfWiki, where you're always welcome.
Imagine a world in which you can contribute to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we have.
Matt Hall
I made a handy cheatsheet, in case you're not familiar with the markup language in MediaWiki-based wikis. It looks scary at first, but once you get accustomed to it, it's fast and easy to use.
Almost anything is possible in wiki markup, but these are the easy things. If there's something else you wish was on there, leave a suggestion in the comments for this post.
communication, community, wiki, writing in Writing 
Reader Comments (5)
Thanks Matt. Been meaning to sign up at Wikipedia for some time (cough-years) and now I have.
@Paul: Good to hear! I'd love to hear about your experiences as you start editing, if you want to share. I hope you find it fun.
You can find me on there as User:Kwinkunks.
Ah! I was just looking back and I see the comment I wrote here didn't post. It was an epic, full of jokes (about epistemology of all things), heart felt sentiment, latin quotes, and lots of other fun stuff. And now it's gone.
Since I hate re-writing what I've already written, I'll just copy and paste something I shared with Evan in an e-mail. It's not as fluffy, but maybe more concise.
--
It's an interesting challenge [writing a post for a Wiki]: when it comes right down to it what does the average person know definitively that they could contribute to something like wikipedia, without being derivative or referencing other sources? It brings back the Theory of Knowledge classes I took at UofC. What do I know? Is what I believe I know actually true?
I do think that contributing to an on-line community is as important as contributing to any "real-world" community. It's helpful to read hotel or restaurant reviews, or to seek advice on-line, but it's vitally important to add your own experience to these communities. Mostly people write to complain about something, and more rarely to heap praise, but almost never to share a good or average experience. How many times have you read "I was hungry for Souvlaki and this restaurant delivered." It's either "the chicken was dry and the service was terrible and the ice tasty funny and I found 17 hairs in my rice" or "this is hands down the best lamb on the entire planet and I eat here every other week and I take all of my out-of-town guests and it's always been an amazing experience" (actually change lamb to fajitas and we could honestly write that of "Las Margaritas"). The problem is usually neither is helpful.
At least neither is helpful on it's own. On-line communities are useful for consensus, and this may be their most important characteristic. If the hyperbolic praise outweighs the hyperbolic hate, you can be generally assured of a good experience. So to with knowledge on Wikis I guess. I don't have to be the authority of a particulay subject, but I can contribute my experience, and others can share their experience and through a distillation process an agreement can be found that is perhaps more "true" than one "authority"'s position.
New term: crowd-sourced knowledge. bam. copyright 2012.
okay, I think I see where things fell apart last time. I don't think I did the word puzzle at the end. That's what happens when to try to finish an essay-length comment by the end of lunch.
New term: commessay. bam. copyright 2012.
@Reid: Argh — sorry about the mis-post. I think that damn Captcha thing catches a lot of people out. I suppose it stops the spam a bit, but I wish Squarespace would put it right next to the submit button. Sigh.
Online reviews are interesting, especially when the opinions are polarized. I think that's often a good sign. Look at the reviews on Trip Advisor for the Sylvia Hotel in Vancouver, which is one of my favourite places to stay in Canada. Lots of people love it too, but every tenth review says "old, tired, dirty", or words to that effect. If that's what it takes to not be just another Hyatt, then so be it.
But yes, I do think the spectrum of experience, Gaussian as it is, is more real, relevant, and objective than any one experience. However, it's not always as useful, precisely because it is always a spectrum. I know some people hate my favourite movie, restaurant, Tintin book, but I don't care about their opinions. The beauty of blogs, Twitter, etc, is that we can find people whose tastes seem to match our own, and then listen to them.
Thanks for commenting, as always!